Fake WhatsApp version spotted on Google Play Store with 1M downloads

Reedit one of the world’s biggest community platform users yesterday spotted an exact copy of the popular messaging platform WhatsApp on Google play store.

Surprisingly the fake version of WhatsApp was downloaded by more than 1 million people. They have also found that the fake WhatsApp app uses some ads to generate revenues.

The app named as the “Updated WhatsApp Messenger” came up from an app developer who has pretended to be the official WhatsApp Inc. This is the same title that actual WhatsApp messenger uses on the Google Play store.

Just in case if you are wondering how the developer has tricked millions of people then here is the answer. The app developer used a Unicode character space to get the “WhatsApp Inc” title. However, thee code remains invisible for most of the average Android users. But according to the computer language, the Unicode reads as the WhatsApp+Inc%C2%A0. As the code was invisible to most of the android users so it was an easy task to trick the users. Pretending to be a product from the actual WhatsApp Inc. However the original WhatsApp version and the fake WhatsApp version appears same to the users, but both of the app services are completely different.

According to reedit user the fake version of WhatsApp was not a chat application. Instead, it works as an ad server and encourages users to download other android application.

Although after the news popped up on the surface. The internet giant did not take too much of time to remove the fake WhatsApp messenger from the Google play store. Although this incident also came up with a question. How much secure the google play store? And how the search engine giant working to spot fake apps?. The app had more than one millions of downloads and it has remained invisible to google play store. However, it is advisable to the users to download apps from the trusted developers as there are thousands of fake apps still exist on google play store. That can steal your private information, or inject some malicious code to your smartphones without letting you know. So be careful while downloading apps from google play store also from other third party websites.

About The Author

Shivam Pokhriyal is an Entrepreneur, an Internet Marketer a Wordpress Developer, and a Graphic Designer. He is the founder of a technology blog- SiliconValleyOxford , His aim is to build products and create a monopoly.